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Thursday, September 22, 2016

Progress is Slow

Good news! I did find those Slownik Geograficzny entries I was looking for! Yeah!

I've also been able to find some family information on a website I visited. By Googling "Wojnicz", one town my Mizera family is from, I found a link to Nekropole.info. I'd heard of the site before but hadn't made the effort to check it out. It turns out that it has the burials listed for the Wojnicz Municipal Cemetery. I was able to find the death date for one of my grandmother's brother's. Yeah! And I may have found the death year for her other brother too but I need to have that confirmed by another source to be sure. No luck finding the death date for grandma's sister yet. And it looks like if her parents were buried there, they aren't anymore.

More good news. I received some information from the Wojnicz parish priest via the genealogist I'd contacted in Poland. I was sent copies of the birth/baptism register entries for one of my grandmother's brothers and her sister. I already had these images from LDS films, BUT, these same entries from the priest had notations of their marriages including the names of their spouses. Yeah! Sort of. Because they aren't marriage records, they don't have all the regular details you would expect to find on a marriage record from the 1920s and 1930s... like the names of the parents of the bride and groom, their ages, addresses, witnesses, etc. So I have some information but not enough info for me to be able to trace the spouse's ancestral lines. :-( Oh well, I am still hopeful that the genealogist I hired will be able to find the actual marriage records for me. Until then, I'm grateful for the progress made. :-)

And one stellar bit of good luck to add! In going through my brother's old slides (taken during the years he was in Vietnam), we came across a family photo taken when he was home on leave. It's a picture of my whole family, both of my parents, my two brothers, and me. What's the big deal, you wonder? It's the only one I've ever seen of all of us in the same room at the same time. I know. Sad, right? Well, mom was almost exclusively the picture-taker and she didn't have a camera with a timer. So she was never in the family pictures, not that there were all that many pictures taken of family events. I screamed and jumped for joy when I saw the slide photo. I didn't think to take a picture of the projected image at the time but my brother was kind enough to do the slide show again and that time I had my camera with me. It will take a LOT of work in Photoshop to make a decent photo from that projected imaged but it's all I have to work with and I'm so very happy to have it. One day my brother may get around to having his slides scanned but that's not in his plans in the near future.

And the last good bit of info I acquired this past month was my Aunt Helen's marriage record from a trial subscription to FindMyPast.com. My mom told me that her sister eloped to Ohio when she got married (1940) but until now I wasn't able to find a record of her marriage. I have it now! Yeah!

The bad news is, this is about all I can say about my genealogy endeavors for the past month. I wasn't able to put in time getting more comfortable with Scrivener. I fear that I will have forgotten what I learned by the time I get it fired up again. And I haven't made any progress in searching my hard drives.

I got sidetracked with Bullet Journaling (BuJo) and that took up the time I might have spent in Scrivener. Let me say a few words about BuJo. I'm excited about the idea of it but the real world practice of it has left me a bit underwhelmed. I created a personal BuJo, tracking my meals, sleep, steps, mood, general health and including task lists and a calendar for future endeavors. It all looks good on paper but I find myself repeatedly recording the same things over and over again (I already track much of this digitally in phone apps). To me, redundancy means wasted time. If I eliminate the stuff I'm already tracking digitally all I'm left with is a standard journal of daily thoughts and activities. Not that that's a bad thing, but I don't find it necessary. And my days are full enough of necessities (my To-Do List) that I already struggle to find time for my painting, photography, and genealogy. Much as I'd like to add daily journaling, it just isn't in the cards right now. I may try to keep it going through October (in a modified version) because I have some exciting personal stuff coming up then but I'm thinking after that I'll let it go in favor of a genealogy BuJo to help me stay on top of my genealogy-oriented organization/research/family-history-writing prep.

I will be spending much of October doing non-genealogy related things so I've not made up specific goals for the month. I'll just have to fit time in here and there as I can. But, I did send in my DNA test kit, and gave my brother his test kit. So I may see some kind of results from those in October. Hope so!